Open Source Community Building
University of Bern, (2005)Abstract
Building an active and helpful community around an open source project is a complex
task for its leaders. Therefore investigations in this work are intended to define
the optimum starting position of an open source project and to identify recommendable
promoting actions by project leaders to enlarge community size in a healthy
way. For this paper eight interviews with committed representatives of successful
open source projects have led to over 12 hours of conversation about community
building. Analysing the statements of these experienced community members exposed
helpful activities that led to the presently prospering communities of their projects.
Summarizing the conclusions of this qualitative research a table with conditions
for successful open source project initialisation and a subject-level promotion
matrix of community building could be created. They include suggestions on how to
start a new open source project and how to improve and increase the community of
an already advanced open source project.